A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

New Research Center Aims to Make Sense of Policies to Improve Teaching

The CTP Partner Institutions University of Washington University of Michigan Stanford University University of Pennsylvania Columbia University

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of experimentation with policies to improve teaching and learning. How can you learn more about these strategies? How can you decide what is most promising for your needs?

This Institute has funded a new Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy (CTP) whose mission is to examine the most promising strategies to support teaching excellence and their impact on student learning. CTP is a consortium of five leading research institutions. With their 5-year $7.5 million grant, the Center will study four classes of reform strategies.

1. Standards-based strategies. Three related strategies will be studied. First, standards for student learning and performance. Reforms of this genre seek to align instructional standards, curricula, and assessments. A second strategy shifts the logic significantly to reforms based on standards for teacher professional performance. Finally, policies that focus on curriculum reform are included in this category.

2. School-based strategies. This set of strategies takes the school site as the starting point for reform and emphasizes schoolwide renewal processes. The goal is to affect learning by changing the school environment either through interaction with high profile national reform networks (e.g., Success-for-All, Accelerated Schools) or through locally developed reforms.

3. Teacher development strategies. While professional development often plays a part in other reform approaches, there is a class of strategies where teacher development is central. It takes as its starting point the building of teachers' capacities from the earliest development of knowledge, skills, and norms in teacher preparation programs through induction support programs. it continues throughout a teachers' career with ongoing professional communities in the workplace. sometimes in partnership with universities, professional networks, or other external reform agents.

4. Coherent management of the teaching policy environment. Some policies seeking comprehensive reform cut across all three of the above categories and combine in one reform package elements of standards-based, school-based, and teacher development strategies. These coordinated approaches will be studied as a separate category.

Past research indicates that the most effective school reform strategies have improvements in teaching and learning as their central goal. Building on that assumption, the Center's findings will provide information to decisionmakers at all levels on how to improve the quality of classroom practice through systemwide integration of policies. It will also provide concrete evidence about the effects of specific reform strategies and models which can be used to make more informed choices. All the Center's research studies will consider teaching in the context of student diversity.

-###-

[High Performance Learning Communities: A New Vision for American Schools] [Grants for Further Research on High Performance Learning Communities]